The setup here is pretty straightforward: a large house suddenly appears in a rural section of a northeaster US town. Trapped in the house is a group of people, all of whom have secrets the house seems to know about. I liked a lot of this. The mysterious nature of the house was compelling. The…

My recent viewing of “The Thirteenth Floor” was actually a rewatch for me; I first saw it when it came out back in 1999. The film, about a virtual reality populated by sentient AI (that’s not the terminology used, but what would you call it today) was somewhat overshadowed at the time. “The Matrix”, the…

How did people digest movies like “Persona” before the Internet? Before the time when you could open up Google, type, “What the hell did I just watch?“ and get some answers. I suppose they had to get together with other people, chain-smoke cigarettes, down espressos, and discuss the film. It doesn’t sound so bad, really.…

This is a good one. I came to watch “Watcher” by way of another movie. I happened across the serial killer short “Slut” on youtube and was impressed with its tense riff on the Red Riding Hood story set in what I took to be 1980s Texas. So impressed was I that I looked for…

More comedy than horror, Three Fingered Willy draws inspiration from classic ’80s campground slashers—Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, etc.—while adding its own comic twists.If you like your horror bloody, you’ll be pleased that amid the campy dialogue and teen soap opera angst are some genuinely brutal kills. The author clearly did some deep thinking about…

Have you ever psychoanalyzed an alien? That’s the premise behind the Russian film “Sputnik” which was released in 2020. How does this situation come about? Two Russian cosmonauts are floating in space in the 1980s when their ship encounters… something. It’s never really clear what, and not really necessary to understand. Later, when they crash…

Early on in my viewing of “Hell of a Summer” I took a note that read: This is as if Woody Allen made a slasher. As the film went on, I realized that summation wasn’t quite right, but it wasn’t totally off. The film is definitely in the comedy/horror space, and the comedy is mostly…

Many years back, with films like “Hostel” and the “Saw” series, we had the advent of what was called torture porn. This basically involved scenes of people being strapped down and gruesomely mutilated. With 2017’s “Truth or Dare“, we have what I would call “self torture porn.“ The plot is basic enough. Several college students…

If you’ve been following the world of horror entertainment, you’re aware  there’s been a rise of films that take intellectual property recently deposited into the public domain as their source material. There was, for instance, a “Winnie the Pooh as a monster” film recently, and also something involving Popeye.  I was not aware that Mickey…

Here’s the link https://bibliophiliatemplum.wordpress.com/2025/06/30/the-mirror-man/

I recently learned about a concept in the world of philosophy, called the regression of interpretation. Essentially, it’s the idea that to define a word, you need to use other words, which themselves need to be defined. I could say a tree is a “cylindrical plant with limbs and leaves,” but then I need to…

A few interesting thoughts related to storytelling hit me this morning. I did some research on it, and I’m far from the first to come up with this stuff, but it seems worth considering. Part of human evolution involved developing the ability to track the social status of members of small groups/tribes, etc. So, knowing…

So I’m currently reading a rather dense introduction to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Or maybe I’m the dense one. I’m not sure.) I’ve known about him for years, and have always been interested in his phrase “the meaning is the use,” which I took to mean that a word’s meaning does not come from…

Horror sequels can be tough to pull off. Often the original lays out a series of perplexing events (teenagers dying in their dreams, for example) and then provides an explanation (Freddy Krueger was killed by those teenager’s parents and seeks revenge.) When you get to the sequel, the mystery is gone.  Sometimes screenwriters handle this…

You’ve encountered killer weed, but killer weeds? Cat and her husband take residence in a summer cabin on a lake. Various tensions start to flare (her husband’s a real dbag) and Cat finds herself drawn to… something in the water. This story has a kind of “simmering cool” that reminded me of a Steven Soderbergh…